BLOOD & OIL:  Sunday 9PM on ABC – If Nothing Else Is On… ABC’s BLOOD & OIL, along with the same network’s midseason The Catch, holds the season’s crown for the most alterations inflicted on a series between pilot script and air.  It’s been recast and reshot in part, made its way through a […]

  THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING (Focus/Universal) – Opens November 7  – Worth A Ticket There’s a benefit but also a burden to being clear-cut “Oscar bait.”  At this point we all know the kinds of movies the Academy looks upon with favor:  serious biographies, period pieces, leading actors who contort themselves in one way or […]

  POWER:  Sunday 9PM on Starz Although Starz has embraced the classy Outlander as the face of its original programming, recently giving it a 2-season renewal, the network’s bread and butter is Courtney A. Kemp’s  hip-hop crime saga POWER, which is by far its highest-rated original.  This season, Starz is using the 3rd stanza of […]

  UNDER THE DOME hasn’t been particularly important as TV drama, but it’s provided some vital information to the broadcast network business.  After years–decades, really–of treating summer as a repository for scripted burn-offs (this summer’s The Goodwin Games as well as flops like Do No Harm and 666 Park Avenue) and cheap international co-productions (Camp, Crossing Lines, Siberia, Motive, etc) […]

  There’s a reason CBS is as successful as it is.  PERSON OF INTEREST is just a procedural–albeit one with an unusually complicated premise–but it mixes solid plotting, well-paced action and just enough character backstory to give it a little substance, and the result is an hour of television that works.   Person starts with […]

  BROKE:  Thursday 9:30PM on CBS Even brand-new episodes of CBS multicamera sitcoms can have a tendency to feel like reruns, and the network’s new midseason series BROKE brings that to the “but this is ridiculous” level.  Broke is built around virtually the same premise as NBC’s midseason sitcom Indebted.  (The two shows even air […]

  In their teardown season as new showrunners of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD, Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg didn’t solve all the problems inherent in the franchise, and the season was uneven, only partly for reasons of transition.  Still, they accomplished a lot, more or less creating a new series from the one that had […]

  An odd thing happened to NASHVILLE in its 5th season, as it shifted networks to CMT and showrunners to Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick.  When series creator Callie Khouri and original showrunner Dee Johnson were in charge, Nashville had revolved around three women:  country music superstar Rayna Jaymes (Connie Britton), glitzy troublemaker Juliette Barnes […]